Value - It’s all relative

That’s what we kept saying to each other during my color class this past weekend, “It’s all relative.” Each fabric has relationships with the fabrics around it, whether it is a color, value or characteristic relationship. Each fabric can change, depending on how those relationships change when a new fabric is added.

It’s almost like a magic trick.

Two fabrics = safe. It is fairly straightforward to identify which is the lighter or darker fabric, and to predict how the two colors will interact, relative to where the two are on the color wheel.

Add a third fabric? You may have introduced the beginning of chaos. The relative values may change – which fabric is the lightest or darkest may have to adjust because now a lighter or darker one has changed the relationship amongst the three.

Three is still quite manageable; adding more fabrics adds greater challenge. It’s fine when the lights and darks are really light and really dark, however, it’s the ones in the middle than can be the really tricky ones. Mediums can be harder to rank in order of the lightest medium to the darkest medium.

Here’s a challenge and a great tip:

Pick 7 scraps or 7 fabrics – any 7 fabrics – they don’t have to “go together” and should be a variety of values and patterns (so don’t choose a bunch of tone on tones). Lay them out in order of light to dark. Take into account the amount of light and soft color in each fabric, the amount of pattern and whether the background is lighter or darker. Make this a game – try to make it fun! It’s not an algebra test. (Apologies to my math teacher children!)

Squinting or scrunching up your cheeks can help you to see more of the value rather than just the color of the fabric. I often just take off my glasses and squint a bit.
You can also use the red and green plastic viewers that are available to help drain the color from fabrics so you can see only the values.
Here’s the great tip and it uses a bit of technology. (I had forgotten all about this until someone brought it up at my color class – thank you!) If you have a smartphone, take a photo of the 7 fabrics, in the light to dark order. Find the edit mode on your camera, and turn the photo into grayscale (black and white).

What a difference! Now, all you can see is how dark or how light a fabric is, especially in comparison to the fabrics around it. Many factors contribute to the value of a fabric, including how intense the color(s) is and what the pattern of the fabric is. The grayscale photo removes much of that ambiguity; it shows you only the overall value of the fabric, without the color and pattern getting in the way.

Back to the 7 fabrics – how did you do? Were they mostly in light to dark order according to the grayscale photo?

This is a helpful exercise to do with the fabrics you intend to use in a quilt. For example, if you are making a scrappy quilt, check out your piles of lights, medium-lights, mediums, medium-darks and darks using the grayscale photo technique. You can also use your camera as you lay a quilt out on your design wall to help you make better value choices and bring out the design in your quilt.

That’s the thing about value. It is often what highlights and reveals the design in a quilt, so it can be what takes your quilt from being “Oh, it’s fine,” to being “I love it!”.

Practicing identifying the lightness and darkness of fabrics and getting comfortable with making those value choices helps to make your quilts more stunning. Having a simple bit of technology to help is great, too, especially when you have more than two or three fabrics and value gets complicated! It’s all relative, after all.